RE: universities experiment with paying OA fees

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

The big publishers have far more capital to invest in providing 
sophisticated, cutting-edge "services"--and don't forget that 
they can afford to pay good stipends to academics to edit their 
journals, too.  The consortial solution you suggest, David, is 
the best way for the smaller publishers to compete. But even a 
large consortium like Project Muse has nowhere near the 
investment capital that the biggest STM publishers do, so it will 
always be a game of catch-up.

Appeals to scholars to support non-profit alternatives have had 
very limited success so far: witness the migration of 
AnthroSource to Wiley. We'll see how successful initiatives like 
Harvard's opt-out mandate is. In view of the UC report on faculty 
attitudes, which showed most scholars (especially in the 
sciences) satisfied with their current publishing arrangements 
and feeling that it is other people who have problems, not 
themselves, I say "good luck."  Faculty attitudes and habits die 
hard.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


> Jim:  Your WalMart comparison is interesting, but I draw a
> different conclusion from it than you do.
>
> The first thing to note is that for the publishing process the
> most important input is the intellectual.  Editors and reviewers
> have no greater incentive to work with a big publisher than they
> do with a small society publisher.  The ability to extract
> intellectual effort from the community is not one that the big
> publishers through their market position can leverage.
>
> Where they can dominate is in sales and marketing.  Big
> publishers can go to individual libraries and consortia and offer
> large bundles, in multi-year packages that tie-in large
> percentages of the libraries' budgets.  They can employ large
> sales-forces to ensure that their products continue to be
> purchased by the consortia.  Small publishers find it harder to
> compete as they do not have the sales-forces and they do not have
> the bundles.  So, it is the current big-deal subscription model
> that encourages WalMart-type behaviour and is leading to the
> consolidation of the market.  We can see this in the trend for
> small and society publishers to move away from independence - a
> move that has nothing to do with open access.
>
> Open access with input fees allows publishers to compete on the
> level of author services - something that small and society
> publisher have traditionally been very good at.  Rather than
> being the death-knell for society publishers it could be their
> best chance of survival - especially compared to the current
> big-deal environment.
>
> Now if we just replace the current model where users (authors and
> readers) are insulated from the subscription costs of journals to
> a new model where users are insulated from publication charges
> then the possibilities of generating a functional market will be
> diminished and small publishers will be disadvantaged as they
> will find it harder to compete against big publisher publication
> charge big-deals (of the 'For a yearly payment of x hundred
> thousand dollars the fees for publishing in any of publisher y's
> 1000 journals are covered for all researchers at institution z'
> type).  That is why it is important that the prices become
> transparent to the users and they become more closely integrated
> with the decision making.
>
> (I should add as an aside that I do think there are places where
> small and society publishers could usefully come together more in
> cooperatives to share development of submission systems,
> publishing platforms and such like. That would provide them with
> some economies of scale while allowing them to concentrate on
> what they are best at - selection and certification.  There have
> been some efforts in this direction - e.g. BioOne - but I would
> like to see more.)
>
> David Prosser
> SPARC Europe